happy endings are the talk of fantasy, darling
by falling winter roses
Summary: don't leave me (you left me) / please, don't give up (let it all go) / a golden ending that we must find (happy endings don't exist, silly) / cho and cedric, the two who never found a golden end. / written for the ilvermorny beaded bag alphabet soup challenge / trigger warning for attempted suicide and implied self harm


**a/n: ello**

 **(possible trigger warning for suicidal thoughts, attempted suicide, and implied self harm)**

 **.**

 _ **C: happy endings are the talk of fantasy, darling**_

 **(set during Sixth Year)**

 **Prompts:**

 **[character] Cho Chang**

 **[scenario] crashing into the one person you really don't want to see**

 **Word Count: 1828**

 _ **cho/cedric: two who never got to the end**_

 **.**

Cho Chang hurried down the corridor, precariously balancing her books, papers, and ink in her hands, as she hadn't had enough time that morning to properly organize it all and put it in her bag. She was taking a shortcut, trying to avoid anyone that might try to approach her about all the shit that had happened the previous night.

"AHHH!"

She crashed into someone, the giant pile of her things spilling all over the floor.

Cho looked up to see exactly who she had bumped into, then stiffened. Oh Merlin, not him. _Anybody_ but him.

"Harry."

"Cho." He hesitated for a moment, then asked, "Do you need any help with that?" Harry gestured to the pile of the things she'd dropped.

Cho regained her composure. "Um, no." She reached to grab her wand, which had also fallen from it's holster when they had bumped into each other.

"You know, you should probably be resting, after what happened last night."

Cho flinched. "Madam Pomfrey fixed me up alright," she said, not daring to look up, scared that she would have to meet his eyes.

"Hey," she heard him say in a low, gentle voice. "I'm here for you, 'aight?"

Cho stiffened, grabbing her stuff, now neatly organized like it had been before. "I don't need your dumb support," she snapped. "Go be the hero with some other 'damsel in distress.'"

She stormed away, head held high, pretending.

Holding back the tears.

* * *

 _She woke up to the obnoxious ringing of the alarm she had set that only she could hear, so she could wake up in time to get back to Ravenclaw Tower before all the others could wake up and get downstairs._

 _Groaning and rubbing her eyes, Cho swung her legs down from the windowsill she'd slept in the previous night. Her back ached from leaning against the hard wall of the classroom, and the long night she'd spent there, alone, wishing for something else._

 _Cho stood and found her feet were bare as they touched the ice-cold floor. Somehow, she must've forgotten to put on her slippers the night before, on her wild dash to find somewhere to cry in solitude._

 _Hurrying down the empty corridors, Cho shivered from the bitter cold of a winter morning in the highlands of Scotland._

 _After hurrying up several flights of stairs and running down many a corridor, she finally reached Ravenclaw Tower and had to take a few minutes for her to figure out the riddle that she had to solve to go in the Tower._

 _After a few trials and errors, Cho finally was able to get in._

 _Sighing in relief at the earliness of her arrival, Cho peeked into the Fifth Year girls' dormitory, and was relieved to find that nobody had woken yet._

 _She stripped off before she got in the shower, staring at herself in the mirror._

 _There were dark circles under her eyes, the large brown eyes which had once held so much life, that were now dimmed from all the shit that had happened the past year at Hogwarts._

 _Her ribs stuck out, stretching the pale skin that covered her torso. She wasn't dangerously underweight, not yet, but she still had had to learn the technique of bulking out so that her robe wouldn't fall off her as soon as she put it on._

 _The tear tracks across her pale and sunken cheeks were wider than usual. Last night must've been a bad one, from the looks of it._

 _Cho stepped into the shower, letting the warm water cascade over her, turning her face up to the steaming fountain of water. She scrubbed away the tear marks down her cheeks, the streaks of dirt and grime on her body from the abandoned, dusty classroom. She tried to scrub away the feeling of phantom hands and phantom voices. She failed._

 _Like everything else she did, she failed._

 _It hurt._

 _But the thing was, she couldn't stop it._

 _And perhaps, just a little bit, she loved it, for giving her the power to bring back the beautiful memories from so long ago.._

 _Yet at the same time, she hated it with a burning passion, for taunting her with everything she couldn't have._

 _Everything, which had long since disappeared into the past that had long since turned into a horrible present._

* * *

 _Cho lay tangled in the folds of her silken sheets, twirling her wand in her fingers, watching it spin around and around, able to see in the dark from the night vision spell she'd cast on herself earlier._

 _Staring blankly, she waited for everybody to get into the 5th Year girls' dormitory._

 _The memories of the day raced around and around in her mind, bringing up the thoughts. The voices, and the memories, the unearthly scream that she had gave when she had found out about the death of the only one she'd ever really loved._

 _Darkness seemed to cloud her vision, blurring the scene before her that she wasn't really watching._

No one cares, _they screamed._ No one cares.

 _Cho quickly cast an invisibility and a silent-steps charm on herself, making sure no one was awake around her before she hurried out of the dormitory._

 _Checking around the Common Room to make sure no one was still in there instead of in their dormitory, she confirmed that no one was out and about before she left Ravenclaw Tower._

 _Cho practically ran, trying to hold back the stream of tears threatening to spill out of her dark, tired eyes that had seen so much and yet so little._

 _Not enough, not enough before he had been killed._

 _She didn't realize where she was going until she arrived—the Astronomy Tower. That day there weren't any lessons being taught by Professor Sinistra, at least Cho didn't think so._

 _She raced up the long, winding stairway up to the Tower, her feet pattering on the cold stone steps upwards, up, up, up._

 _She collapsed in front of the open window of the Tower, the cold winter chill of the bitter wind easily going through her flimsy nightgown and chilling her to the bone, but she didn't care. She shivered and shook, but not from the cold, not from the bitter wind that made her long black hair whip around her face, making her look like some horrifying demon._

 _She shivered and shook from the tears, the sobs, the memories invading her mind. The memories she both loved and hated with a fiery passion, the memories that_ she just couldn't stop. _And it hurt, it really, really, really fucking hurt, but she couldn't stop them,_ them, _the memories that had haunted her for so many long, long years._

No one cares, _they screamed._ He did, but you killed him. You killed him. You _let him die._

 _She couldn't do it anymore._

 _Cho slipped out the small blade she had kept with her ever since that fateful day when the first red line had been made upon her once vibrant skin, when that blade had first been dragged violently across her skin, desperate to draw blood._

 _She cut the blade into her skin, again and again, trying to stop the pain of all the emotions she couldn't stop, but it wasn't enough, it_ was not enough, _nothing was enough anymore._

 _And so she knew what she had to do, she knew what it must come down to._

 _She clambered up onto the windowsill, hands clinging to the sides of the frame, head stretching out over and above the castle grounds below._

 _She settled herself into a sitting position, back leaning against the side of the windowsill._

 _Hands trembling, she took the blade and cut down, deep into her skin._

 _She did not scream._

 _She did not cry._

 _She did not feel pain._

 _Not anymore._

 _Cho let her bleeding arms fall limply to the sill, the blood flowing out over the ancient stones._

 _The last thing she heard was a cry._

" _Help!"_

* * *

 _Harry pulled out the Marauder's Map, continuing his nightly ritual of searching for Draco Malfoy on the map._

 _He did, of course, search mostly on the corridor where the Room of Requirement was, looking for the name_ Draco Malfoy _to appear, suddenly, in that stretch of Hogwarts._

 _But that night, Cho had gone to a different part of the palace, a place high and cold and abandoned instead of the usual empty classroom she sought refuge in._

 _And she had taken a different route, a route which involved going up, up to a tall, lonely tower, and going through a corridor which held a hidden, secret room._

 _So that night Harry saw the name_ Cho Chang _appear on that lonely seventh floor corridor, and a surprised look came over his face._

 _Why, of all people, was_ Cho Chang _out and wandering at this ungodly hour?_

 _His curious nature got the better of him, and he took of his nightclothes to reveal the regular day clothes he was wearing underneath, so as to be able to quickly get out of the Gryffindor Common Room without anyone asking why he wasn't yet in his pajamas._

 _Harry slipped out the entrance to the Common Room, ignoring the Fat Lady's annoyed scolding for being woken at such a time._

 _Hurrying up and down the staircases and corridors, Harry made his way up that corridor on the seventh floor, still searching the map for where Cho had gone. He saw her name, alone, up in the Astronomy Tower, and his brow furrowed in confusion._

 _There wasn't an Astronomy class that night, and in any case, Cho was alone, no other names anywhere near her._

 _Deciding to abandon his task for that night, he went up to the Astronomy Tower as fast as he could, and opened the door to—_

Oh Merlin.

 _There was Cho Chang, slumped in the open windowsill of the Astronomy Tower, the bitterly cold wind blowing her dark hair around her limp body._

 _Her arms were dark, stained with crimson blood, and covered with lines… some red, some white, some faded…_

 _Scars…_

" _Help!" he cried. He ran down, and found himself bumping into a Professor Snape._

" _What are you doing out at this hour, Potter? Shouldn't you be in bed? Perhaps Gryffindor needs a few points taken away…."_

" _Professor, come quick!" Harry said hurriedly. "It's… Cho… Cho Chang… Come quick!"_

 _He didn't look very happy about it, but Professor Snape followed along and they reached the Astronomy Tower._

 _The professor's eyes widened, and he drew his wand and rushed to Cho's side._

" _Get Madam Pomfrey and Professor Flitwick, quickly," he said, getting to work on healing Cho's wounds._

 _Harry nodded, hurrying down the stairway, looking to find the professors._

* * *

 _Cho woke with her body aching and her head throbbing, and her eyes blinded by the bright white curtains around her._

" _Ugh, what is that," she muttered to herself, rubbing her eyes._

 _Then she realized where she was._

The infirmary.

" _Oh Merlin, no."_


End file.
